On May 1, 1931, President Herbert Hoover pressed a button in Washington, D.C., and 1,250 feet away in New York City, the lights of the Empire State Building blazed on. At 102 stories, it was the tallest building in the world - and it had taken just one year and 45 days to build. Workers had stacked steel and stone at a blistering pace of about four and a half floors per week.
The project was a race. A rival building, the Chrysler Building, had just claimed the title of world's tallest. The Empire State's planners wanted to crush that record, so they added a fancy spire on top that was supposed to be a docking station for airships like the Hindenburg. (That idea never really worked - the winds were too wild.) About 3,400 workers, many of them Mohawk ironworkers known for their nerve at dizzying heights, built the tower during the Great Depression, when jobs were rare and money was tight.
When it first opened, the building was so empty that people nicknamed it the Empty State Building. But over time it became the symbol of New York itself, starring in movies like King Kong and lighting up the skyline in different colors for holidays. It held the world's tallest title for 40 years until the World Trade Center was finished in 1971. Even today, millions of visitors ride elevators to its observation deck to look out over the city it helped define.
